Researchers have discovered that a short exposure to intense heat can repair flash memory chips, which traditionally suffer from reliability issues over time.

Researchers have discovered that a short exposure to intense heat can repair flash memory chips, which traditionally suffer from reliability issues over time.

Staff at Macronix in Taiwan managed to increase the lifespan of flash memory from just 10,000 write and read cycles to a whopping 100 million cycles through the use of heat “healing.”

The chips were redesigned to include a built-in heater, which would periodically jolt the material with a few milliseconds of heat at 800 degrees Celsius, many times the temperature of an oven. This brief exposure fully restores damage portions of the memory chip.

Tests have shown that the new chips can last at least 100 million write and read cycles, but there is potential that they could last much longer than this, possibly even into billions of cycles, but this would take months to test.

For those concerned about the possible fire risk, the researchers said that the device is perfectly safe, since the heat is only applied for a short duration. It will also only use a small amount of power, so it should not adversely affect battery life.

Macronix, which makes flash memory, said it plans to send the technology to market, but it is not clear how long it will take before we have self-healing memory chips in our devices.